The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789
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Race and slavery present even more daunting interpretive challenges. There is no way to finesse the fact that slavery was built into the American founding, just as it was built into the economy of all the states south of the Potomac. Historians who prefer to downplay that awkward reality thereby obscure the most consequential and tragic choice the founders were forced to make. Although most of the prominent founders, and all the men featured here, fully recognized that slavery was incompatible with the values of the American Revolution, they consciously subordinated the moral to the political agenda, permitting the continuance and expansion of slavery as the price to pay for nationhood. This decision meant that tragedy was also built into the American founding, and the only question we can ask is whether it was a Greek tragedy, meaning inevitable and unavoidable, or a Shakespearean tragedy, meaning that it could have gone the other way, and the failure was a function of the racial prejudices the founders harbored in their heads and hearts.10
There is little doubt that the lost world of the founding was a more explicitly racist world than our own. The founders were truly remarkable for their ability to imagine a nation-size republic and a political framework that insisted on the separation of church and state, both of which were unprecedented social experiments that succeeded. But neither they nor the vast majority of white Americans were capable of imagining a biracial society. (Neither, for that matter, was such a staunch opponent of slavery as Harriet Beecher Stowe, who provided an appendix at the end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that described her plan for deporting all the freed slaves back to Africa.) We need to remind ourselves that racial integration in the United States was a mid-twentieth-century idea that few if any of the founders could have comprehended. Imposing our racial agenda on them is politically correct but historically irresponsible.
Given the parameters of the possible within which the founders were working, the republic they created has rather remarkably stood the test of time, indeed has lasted longer than any of them expected. To end where we began, with Lincoln, the operative question that all the European pundits were asking back then was whether “any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.” After more than two centuries, the answer is abundantly clear. And now for how it happened.
Chapter 1
THE ARTICLES AND THE VISION
Certain I am that unless Congress speaks in a more decisive tone; unless they are vested with powers by the several states competent to the great purposes of War…, that our cause is lost…. I see one head gradually changing into thirteen.
George Washington to Joseph Jones
MAY 31, 1780
On March 1, 1781, three and a half years after they were endorsed by the Continental Congress, the Articles of Confederation were officially ratified when the last state, Maryland, gave its approval. The unseemly delay could be explained by the conspicuous fact that a war was going on, which inevitably deflected attention from all other business, but the specific reason was that the landless states, like Maryland, refused to ratify until all the states with extensive western claims—Virginia most prominently—agreed to cede their claims to Congress. The president of the Continental Congress, Samuel Huntington, declared the creation of a new political entity, called the Confederation Congress, which established “a perpetual Union between the thirteen United States.” To mark the occasion, thirteen cannons were fired on the hill overlooking the Philadelphia harbor, and that salvo was answered by thirteen cannons from the frigate John Paul Jones. In the evening “a grand exhibition of fireworks was staged at the State House, and all the Vessels in the Harbor were decorated and illuminated.”1
At almost the same time that Americans were celebrating their newly declared union, a pamphleteer in London, Josiah Tucker, predicted that any vision of an emergent American nation-state would prove to be a mirage, “one of the idlest, and most visionary Notions, that ever was conceived by the Writers of Romance.” Tucker spoke for all those English and European pundits who regarded the very term United States as a comical oxymoron. The diversity of climates, competing regional interests, and long-standing political disagreements made it impossible to imagine that Americans could ever, as he put it, “be united into one compact Empire, under any species of Government whatsoever.” What had brought them together in the summer of 1776 was their common desire to secede from that empire. If they failed in that effort—and the issue in the spring of 1781 remained uncertain—Americans would revert back to their identity as British subjects. If they succeeded, they would dissolve into a political stew of local, state, and regional principalities likely to end up fighting one another. “Their Fate,” predicted Tucker, “seems to be—A DISUNITED PEOPLE, till the End of Time.”2
A closer look at the recently ratified document that promoted all those salvos and illuminations reveals that Tucker’s skepticism about any emergent American nation-state was not that far off the mark. For the Articles of Confederation were not, and were not intended to be, a political framework for a national government. Indeed, the Articles were not designed to establish any kind of government at all. As its name suggests, the Articles created a confederation of thirteen sovereign states that were nations themselves, entering, as Article III put it, “into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defence, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare.” It was less a constitution than a diplomatic treaty among sovereign powers.3
The key provision was Article II: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.” Those powers, jurisdictions, and rights were quite few, chiefly to resolve border disputes between states, establish standard weights and measures and a common currency (though the states were not prohibited from printing their own money), and create “a common treasury” from funds raised by taxes on the states to pay for the war. Whether the states were legally obliged to pay the tax levies was left ambiguous. Article VIII vested authority in the state legislatures to comply “within the time agreed upon by the United States in Congress assembled.” For three years the vast majority of states had failed to pay their share of taxes to support the Continental Army, leaving a legacy of confusion about where the power of the purse ultimately resided. In the absence of a clear resolution in the Articles, it effectively resided in the states.4
In at least two other aspects, it was clear that the political framework created by the Articles was not designed to function as a national government. First, the proper model for a republican government had been established in the state constitutions, almost all of which followed the guidelines proposed by John Adams in his Thoughts on Government (1776). The central ingredients in the Adams political recipe were a bicameral legislature, an elected or appointed governor, and an independent judiciary, an early version of the separation-of-powers doctrine later embodied in the federal Constitution. The structure of the Articles—a single-house legislature and an appointed but powerless president—dispensed with all the political wisdom that had accumulated in the states about a properly balanced republican government, because, in truth, that is not what the Articles were intended to be.5
Second, there was no way the Confederation Congress could claim to be a representative body. Article V put it succinctly: “In determining questions in the United States in Congress assembled, each State shall have one vote.” This meant, in effect, that Rhode Island, the smallest state, had the same political power as Virginia. The one-state-one-vote principle represented a continuation of the practice followed in the Continental Congress, which had come into existence in 1774, before the debates over state constitutions occurred and before the commitment to proportional representation in the state legislatures had become an accepted, indeed essential, constitutional feature. By rejecting proportional representation, the architects of the Articles were making a clear statement that they did not intend the Confederation Con
gress to function as a national government once the war was won. The closest approximation in our own time is the European Union.6
It was not always so. During the first fifteen months of the war, from the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and Concord in April 1775 to the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, the Continental Congress had functioned as a provisional national government, exercising control over military strategy, diplomacy, and economic policy much in the manner of a fully empowered federal government. To be sure, these were heady times, when the all-consuming character of the political and military crisis literally forced the delegates in Congress to assume emergency powers, and to do so in a political environment so saturated with patriotism that dissent was tantamount to treason. In this exuberant moment, when all political disagreements were enveloped within the protective canopy of “The Cause,” it became possible to believe that the wartime alliance was symptomatic of something much larger and more permanent. The Philadelphia physician and revolutionary gadfly Benjamin Rush said it out loud: “We are now a new Nation…dependent on each other—not totally independent states.” The war for American independence had also become, at least in some minds, a war for American nationhood.7
But Rush’s national vision proved to be a temporary infatuation. Until independence was officially declared on July 2, 1776, then announced to the world two days later, there was enormous pressure to sustain a united front. The cracks and fissures in that front appeared for all to see in late July and early August, when the delegates put themselves in a committee-of-the-whole format to debate the character and shape of the new government for the recently created United States. That debate proved to be a preview of coming attractions, exposing the latent sectional and ideological differences that would haunt the American experiment well into the next century.
The debate focused on a document written by a committee of twelve delegates in June, prior to the vote on independence, and chaired by John Dickinson, the leader of the moderate faction in Congress. Called the Dickinson Draft, it is an elusive text that has caused several generations of historians to throw up their hands in frustration, because Dickinson attempted to synthesize the competing convictions of a large committee that harbored fundamentally different ideas about what the emergent American republic should look like. The Dickinson Draft is, in truth, one of the most revealing documents of the revolutionary era, not in spite of but because of its intellectual incoherence. For what Dickinson attempted to achieve was a political compromise between those who wanted a state-based confederation and those who wanted a federal government with enumerated powers over the states. In other words, Dickinson tried and failed to do in the summer of 1776 what James Madison and his Federalist colleagues succeeded in doing in the summer of 1787.8
No official record of the debate exists because none was kept. Fortunately, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson kept extensive notes on the deliberations, which occurred between July 22 and August 20. This meant that they coincided with the looming British invasion of Long Island. Despite that distraction, the political issues at stake got the attention of the most prominent delegates, including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Ironically, Dickinson himself was absent, having gone to command his militia unit in New Jersey in anticipation of the British attack in New York.9
The debate exposed three fundamental disagreements: first, a sectional split between northern and southern states over slavery; second, a division between large and small states over representation; and third, a more general argument between proponents for a confederation of sovereign states and advocates for a more consolidated national union. There was considerable overlap between the second and third arguments, since defenders of the one-state-one-vote principle were implicitly rejecting the viability of a nation-size republic.
Slavery was too volatile a subject to be addressed directly; indeed, there was an unspoken policy of silence surrounding the topic based on the broadly shared sense that it, more than any other issue, possessed the potential to destroy the political consensus that had formed around independence. But slavery was too embedded in the economy of the southern states to avoid altogether, and it came up, albeit obliquely, during debate over Article XII of the Dickinson Draft, which proposed that “the expenses for the war and the general welfare shall be defrayed out of a Common Treasury, which shall be supplied by the several colonies in proportion to the Number of Inhabitants of every Age, Sex and Quality, except Indians.” An argument then ensued over how to count “Inhabitants,” which soon became an argument over slaves: Were they persons or property?10
The delegates from the southern states insisted that slaves were property, like horses and sheep, and therefore should not be counted as “Inhabitants.” Franklin countered this claim with an edgy joke, observing that slaves, the last time he looked, did not behave like sheep: “Sheep will never make any insurrections.” The South Carolina delegation, which did not find this funny, then issued the ultimate threat. If the northern states insisted on this point, “there is an End of the Confederation.”
In response to this threat of a southern secessionist movement, Samuel Chase of Maryland urged all delegates to calm down, then proposed to insert “white” before “Inhabitants” in order to appease his southern brethren. But the northern delegates, led by Adams, objected strenuously to this change, accusing South Carolina of attempting to avoid its fair share of the tax burden to finance the war. In a thoroughly sectional vote, Chase’s amendment was defeated.11
In the long view, which is to say looking down the road another eight decades or so, this debate proved prophetic. It was the first occasion when the intractable dilemma posed by slavery found its way into the public record. And in 1861 South Carolina acted on the same secessionist threat it first made in the summer of 1776. More immediately, both northern and southern delegates recognized the need to deflect the “Inhabitants” question, and they revised the Dickinson Draft so that each state would be billed “in proportion to the value of all land within each state,” thereby skirting the slavery question but in the process producing a criterion for taxation that proved inherently immeasurable and infinitely manipulable by the state legislatures.
If the debate over slavery had enormous long-term implications, the debate over representation posed more pressing problems that defined the shape of the political settlement for the next decade. Here the argument was not sectional but rather between large and small states. Article XVIII of the Dickinson Draft proposed a continuation of the one-vote-per-state principle. Delegates from Massachusetts, Virginia, and Pennsylvania found that principle preposterous, indeed a recipe for chaos and endless bickering, because the disproportionate political power of the small states defied the economic realities: “Let the small colonies give equal Money and Men,” Franklin argued, momentarily forgetting that the colonies were now states, “and then have an equal vote.” Adams chimed in that the only sensible basis for representation was population, because any stable republican government needed to reflect the will of its citizenry.12
Both Franklin and Adams were thinking of a new government that was more potent and unified than a mere confederation. The most ardent advocate for such a vision was Rush, who projected a national picture of Americans as “a single people,” no longer Virginians or Rhode Islanders, and the term United States as a singular rather than plural noun. The debate over representation had thus exposed the first serious split between nationalists and confederationists.
Delegates from the small states found Rush’s national vision a political nightmare that merely exchanged the despotic power of Parliament for a domestic version of the same leviathan. Roger Sherman of Connecticut led the small-state delegation with a warning that his constituents would never surrender their liberties to some distant government that did not share their values. He could testify that Connecticut would passionately embrace “The Cause,” but once the war was won, his country was Connecticut, and any loyalty that extended beyond the borders of
his state defied the local and at most regional orientation of his constituents, which was “as far as we are prepared to go.”13
This was a revealing way to put it. Beneath the argument between large and small states over representation lurked a more fundamental disagreement about distance and scale. The vast majority of Americans lived and died locally. Representative government as they experienced it was a face-to-face affair. So that above and beyond—or rather beneath and beyond—questions of political architecture lay a residual psychological reality that was severely circumscribed and that imposed geographic limits on the political imaginations of the vast bulk of ordinary Americans. Feeding into the small-scale perspective were all the political arguments that colonists had thrown at the British ministry from 1765 to 1775, stigmatizing parliamentary power as illegitimate because it was distant and disconnected from their local and state interests. The greater the distance, in effect, the greater the distrust. The geographic boundaries of a state, as Sherman had so nicely put it, were as far as they were prepared to go. A decade later, this apprehension about governments beyond immediate surveillance became the primal source of Antifederalist opposition to the Constitution, and it was unquestionably the perspective of most American citizens.
Almost as an appendix to the debate between nationalists and confederationists was the debate over the ill-defined western borders of states, like Virginia, with claims that reached to the Mississippi or, even more preposterously, to the Pacific. There was a consensus in the Congress that these extravagant claims were based on colonial charters that had been drafted before anyone realized the size of the North American continent. (One map put the Alleghenies within one hundred miles of the Pacific.) Admission to the Articles of Confederation required a state to cede its territorial claims to western lands, but left ambiguous how that cession would occur and whether the state could determine its own borders. This alienated the “landless” states, which worried that large states like Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York would become even larger upon arrival. In an effort to assure his colleagues from Maryland that the Old Dominion would behave responsibly, Thomas Jefferson insisted that “no Virginian intended to go to the South Seas,” an apparent reference to the Pacific. But only Virginians found this assurance convincing.14